NET ADAPTATION felt like a step in the right direction in terms of finally figuring out a way to appropriately and engagingly incorporate the possibilities offered by screen media. When trying to explain what this studio was to friends of mine at the MEDIA PRESENTS… showcase, ‘interactive documentary’ is what I threw around, which in essence is really what NET ADAPTATION is in the most literal sense. Other groups branched from this (all in really interesting ways) but for some reason ‘interactive documentary’ felt like a key word for a lot of what we were doing this semester. Screen media is of course much broader than just that.

In responding to the supplied characteristics, NET ADAPTATION incorporates:

• interactivity (first and foremost)
  • This is what we’ve been talking about all semester long. Interactivity, y’all: how can we get people to interact?; how do people interact?; why would anyone want to interact? Given our questioning came in a guaranteed response, we’re-all-in-this-together studio type situation where we all had to interact with each others’ things anyway, this was presented as a larger question, beyond the (way too hot) walls of the new media classrooms — how do we get people to interact not only physically in response to the prompts of the given project, but also in a general sense? I think about it a lot. There’s so much stuff and I’ve reached a point where that kinda depresses me. The cream of the crop might rise to the top but what of everything else? I saw this tweet the other day and I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t the only one that felt this:
    

    just did that thing where I made myself depressed from browsing the garbage content on netflix

    — Bront (@bmrow) May 30, 2018

    It’s one of those moods where you can’t decide what to watch amid the “””endless””” catalogue of things that get added and probably never watched. Have you ever scrolled to the bottom of Netflix? It’s a new type of hell. There’s just so much stuff that I feel in every moment like Cate Blanchett’s character in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where she finally gets the titular skull at the end of her quest for infinite knowledge and her brain catches on fire and… Spielberg does the thing
    
    Anyway, interactivity factors into NET ADAPTATION as the most integral principle. It’s how you engage with the content — you’re an active user; your decisions factor into your experience. You could spend the entire time focused on one discipline and not dare look at any of the others. You could watch and read every interview. It’s up to you — your interaction with the project is key to its functioning. There is no collective memory. (This stuff ties directly into the other principles).

• non-linearity (adios conventional doco principles)
  • When you edit a linear feature length film, you’re essentially committing it to a singular existence. There may exist a director’s cut, or a range of lost cuts and reduxes and remixes (though this may be bordering beyond the finite intentionality of the film), but essentially it’s about creating one thing, one experience. Linearity ensures cohesion between parts — rhythm, continuity, etc. Committing your work to a non-linearity existence complicates all this. Non-linearity exists in film, sure, but we’re moving beyond macho 90s crime thrillers (that still adhere to linearity in the edit — Pulp Fiction is still one big single film regardless of however many time jumps it has). NET ADAPTATION is non-linear in a greater sense. Within each principle is a series of profiles of interviewed folk and there’s no given way for you to move through what they’re saying — they’ve each got a small intro but you’re not prompted to play through this first, or even at all. It’s a big network of big questions posed to big people and programmed through a small bit of software and and built into something that could potentially be big, endless. NET ADAPTATION could hypothetically document all the ways that the internet is changing us and our disciplines from now until the end of time and still retain its shape — your regular film couldn’t. This is the power we can afford it.
• modularity (kinda serendipitously)
  • Our early draft phases saw each of our interviews being composed in a single video but as it turns out, people have a lot to say on this issue and we received more content than we originally imagined — thus, we had to break it down. As the interviews went on, we constructed a more cohesive way of structuring questions (in relation to the way that we’d program it) and it turned out a much better project for that. Each video responds to a given question — able to be viewed within the project among its other parts, or taken by itself.
• multi-linearity (shoutout to Alexia for giving me “kinda like a choose-your-ownadventure documentary”).
  • “Choose-your-own adventure” just reminds me of this one (Give Yourself) Goosebumps book I once had my grandma buy for me at the bookstore next to the karate place in my hometown (pictured below) and I can’t shake it — it wasn’t even that great a book (The Barking Ghost underrated, regardless of how much that cover scared the life out of me as a kid).
    
    But in many ways this project is like that. Despite our failure to master Korsakow and its simplistic design (though able to get very complicated), NET ADAPTATION lends itself to being trawled through at your own leisure, on your own path. In many ways this is tied to non-linearity and feeds into the same kinda principle — and our project would’ve functioned better given a back button here or there, but alas.

What we ended up with was kinda an alpha version of what we really wanted (beta if I’m being generous) but I think it works to respond to the thinking through of ideas posed this semester in an engaging way — with content relevant and interesting enough to garner some attention (thanks to those who came out at MEDIA PRESENTS… to have a look). This is the kinda content that would only work on the internet, and could work even better if we could commit to making the project ongoing, giving it a life beyond what it exists as now. As I’ve mentioned in a previous development post, uncertainty is key; the unpredictability of a given screen media project may be its saving grace. That’s the crux of Korsakow — maybe we tried to tame it too much here? In development we mentioned the idea of NET ADAPTATION being an interactive mindmap (which assumes mapped out parts), and Korsakow functions a whole lot on ideas opposite this, so maybe there was a better place to host our work but it was interesting nonetheless.

I don’t have any real clues about gaining an audience for this stuff, getting people to interact. Maybe all these algorithms given their unpredictability can figure it out for us. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

And here we are. Another semester, another studio down. When I chose the media degree, I had no idea what these studios were — I mean, I didn’t even realise this is what’d take up two thirds of my workload until like a semester in (I don’t even know what I pictured this course as, like… the media subject at my high school (warning: Media One post) was a joke). But they’ve provided a great sense of depth to my degree and I feel like I chose the right few.

NET ADAPTATION (2018) by Darcy Read, Denise Wang & Sam Harris

An exploration of industry as influenced by the internet.

The term ‘Development Hell’ isn’t necessarily reserved for things like this, but, for the past week, our project has been stuck in wherever that term suggests.

The content is all good — our interviews went well and worked towards achieving modularity (this sounds way too much like reaching singularity) better than previously anticipated. But Korsakow is a tricky beast, and hard to tame, and maybe not ideally meant to be used in the way we’d like. We’ve got a few too many interfaces that aren’t having a great time linking together, but alas, those are the challenges you must overcome when working with this smaller kind of software.

Visually, most of our thumbnails look nice and the project is more or less accessible. It may not pop like Seven Digital Deadly Sins but it’s got the same heart. Last week’s in-class musical chairs of a consultation with all the other groups validated our ideas in the project — everyone seemed to understand where we were going and what it’d look like once we passed around our mindmap-looking plan. After seeing how other groups had branched out into other software, we partially considered making a move to something like eko but a lot of that content looked more conventional (linear??) and appealed more to fiction.

In wrapping things up, I thought a lot about Johnathan Harris’ work and how it pays to have some technical, web-design-based skills when you’re trying to make these projects. I feel like some of the limitations of this stuff involves simply not knowing how to put your ideas into a given software — having a really great idea but being unable to translate it technically. As I’ve previously mentioned, Korsakow seems to work in favour of smaller things (deconstructing certain ideas, films) and other groups (the ~super erotic~ hands!!!!!!!!) have really made strides in using the software to its full potential. When struggling to program our interfaces together, I had the thought of transposing our work to something like a blog, moving everything to hyperlinks. Hypothetically, it’d work — so how much does our project benefit from using Korsakow? Have we done it justice?

Something like Balloons of Bhutan does some part of what our project does in a much more expansive and cleaner way. I think in some way this inspired our work.

That’s the dream.

or: “HOW TO CUT THROUGH THE WEEDS OF THE INTERNET” (our placeholder title)

In week 10, Hannah asked us to consider why we were making our projects. What was our focus? While we making, we should be thinking about why we are making. To inform? To argue? To entertain? Finding a direction ultimately helps provide a purpose which, in turn, will drive the making. What currently sits as “HOW TO CUT THROUGH THE WEEDS OF THE INTERNET” is being made to inform, to generate some (hopefully helpful) knowledge on the new technologies and possibilities of the internet in relation to popular media disciplines. But, it’s being done in a way that breaks from conventional linear documentary.

I’ve been aware of the through-lines between this studio and my studio from semester one last year in a lot of the making. In looking over what we read and made in that studio, I came across one of the readings that I really appreciated then: a chapter from David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

“342: The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material–how do you go about arranging it?”

I guess that was us last year, and that’s us again. Removing the linearity from your work opens up an entirely new space of consumption, a new way of looking at things. Our project — as it currently exists — is interesting only because of its non-linearity, because of its ability to cross and move between different parts in a way that is far removed from the linear editing suite. The agency is given back to the user.

Whether or not we can successfully make it work like that is still up for debate — when filming our interviews we found that they went twice, nearly three times as long as we expected so we’ve had to cut them up (hey, modularity!).

This a mindmap, not a storyboard

Interactivity doesn’t come from linearity — we drew a map of what our project (ideally) would look like and it’s far from applicable to something like Premiere. Hopefully Korsakow can house our work.

This week (week 10) we figured out the focus of our project, what we’re applying the structure of Seven Digital Deadly Sins‘ layout to: “online branding”, How To Promote Yourself Online, the discourses around the growth of the internet and how it has affected certain media disciplines — something like that. In that way, I guess the content of SDDS also has some importance, but instead of pseudo-satirical, fake deep interview content (if you can watch SDDS’ ‘Sloth’ interview without cringing, let me know) we’re going to branch out and put to screen(/s) some of the ways that people have dealt with the rise of the internet. We’re thinking of interviewing a range of both students and teachers (mostly RMIT-based) and poses them a set of questions.

As it currently stands, we’re thinking of breaking the project up by discipline (just like each of the sins) and having the viewer navigate through the project and this way — not sure what else we’ve got here. In terms of disciplines, the few currently on the table are: Music, Fine Arts, Architecture, Film, Music and Journalism. We considered the idea of compiling interviews, written stories, audio clips, photos, YouTube clips — sourcing things beyond our own creation — but we considered this a little too broad, and wanted to narrow our focus to a few specifically targeted questions to a few selected people. The content will range from video interviews to written interviews.

Having completed a film criticism-based studio last semester, I began actually using Twitter, and finally saw its worth with regards to journalism and how networking (across networks!) was an integral part to gaining traction in that field. A quick RMIT Library Search around journalism and Twitter and branding turned up the paper Personal Branding on Twitter (2017) [by Cara Brems, Martina Temmerman, Todd Graham & Marcel Broersma] which if nothing else validated (academically) that this was a thing and that at least some aspect of what we’re making this fourth assignment about isn’t some totally ephemeral practice that my Twitter obsession has fictionalised.

This one time, in high school… myself and two friends started noticing — through the proliferation of social media platforms like Instagram (mostly Instagram) and through that phase where you think it’s cool to just “go into town” and hang around the shops for hours — that a lot of girls had begun wearing the same shirt. This shirt (IIRC) was an armless t-shirt that came in either black or white, and had a large outline of a cross taking up the majority of the material with seven words listed down the front. Those words? The seven deadly sins.

It became the crux of my friendship with these two people, the discussion, screenshotting of, and subsequent IRL noticing of this shirt that everyone had started to wear. If you’d asked me why then, I’d have no idea what the purpose of this quest was – now, my memories of it have mostly faded. I guess it was just data collection. For some reason, it temporarily became a thing.

And that’s my preface to the first development post for assignment 4. No, we haven’t decided to focus on data collection (as much as I’d like! I had a great idea that was rejected by the team that I will later talk about and link this post to). The only reason this story got some neurons firing in my brain is because we found a project called Seven Digital Deadly Sins that we think could form the (structural, mostly; content, maybe) basis of our next assignment! Yeehaw.

Seven Digital Deadly Sins presents you initially with an interface stacked with seven different cards – each relating to different deadly sin. Click through to any of these sins and you’re greeted by seven more cards: one of these is a video interview (the digital focal point of the project), three of these are an anonymously contributed stories, and another three are questionnaires/quizzes that allow you to condemn or absolve people on their (antisocial?!??!!?) behaviours. Some of the interviews are absolutely terrible – beyond parody, serious what if phones but too much content. But structurally, it’s what we’re aiming for.

It’s a well formatted layout, easy to navigate, simple to make (hopefully!) and gives you a clear pathway through the project. We’re hoping at this point that this’ll give us a more complex and structured way of going about our next project following our fairly sparse assignment 3 – more content, better use of the software, a more satisfying project. No shirts though.

How does music change the way we interpret images that are neutral in content?

That’s it. That’s the pitch – not that it was so easy to pin it down in the first place.

In doing this we aimed to create a single video, composed of various shots of the city, to be overlaid with 6 different audio tracks: 5 of various genres, one with an atmos/native audio track. The video doesn’t follow any particular narrative but is linked through the cut by various graphic elements – an emphasis on line, and motion within the frame driving (😏) certain cuts. Within this, there are various particular paths we edited that the eye can follow (mainly through the many passersby), though these aren’t necessarily the dominant through-lines of the work.

Our footage took particular visual inspiration from excerpts of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1977). Though these both feature a whole lotta voice-overs and languid letter-reading, our focus centered around the emotional connection we have to music (maybe these voice-overs are something we can focus on next time?). Moments of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) kept popping into my head during workshopping and while its visuals are similar in content to the former examples, their scale is much more grandiose, epic (though its musical ideas may prove particularly insightful going forward) [just watched a trailer – this film feels so haunted]. Korsakow, as noted, is a more useful tool in breaking down larger parts/themes/ideas as opposed to sweeping, hyper-cinematic spectacle (though I’m sure someone could put it to good use in that area).

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) dir. Godfrey Reggio

Our attempts to capture the mundanity of the city proved fruitful, Darcy’s DSLR owns at recording really expressive nighttime footage. Our visuals attempted to capture an image of a city that’s always moving, always in motion, with hundreds of working parts moving back and forth (literally across the frame). Banality exists within this motion too – these are simple actions (walking, driving), neutral in tone – and the various music we overlaid (original compositions also by Darcy, the GOAT) works to aurally represent different, often disparate moods.

Our work responds to notions of modularity insofar as we used the fragmentary nature of Korsakow to create a large, semi-randomised chain of smaller, modular parts. Within these parts are more modular pieces – our single video was made up of a composite of twelve separate shots cut together using Premiere. From there, we added an audio track to each then tagged these in Korsakow to have the neutral, atmos/native audio video play first with the remaining 5 tagged to randomly show up in the tray below. This sequencing ensures that each experience is different – though a minor feat, the order in which each viewer experiences the 6 set fragments can in itself produce and/or complicate a potential emotional response. Here, variability plays a part within the project, though not to its fullest extent. Much of the limitations of our work come from not using Korsakow to its full potential. As evidenced by other groups’ work in the presentations, there is much that can be done with the software beyond our project. In the future, I think that creating more parts (dependent on what we choose to produce going forward of course) will be beneficial, enhancing the interactivity thus forming a more engaging and expressive piece of media. More keywords – a larger tangle of fragments.

In response to our pitch feedback, following the trajectory we’ve (Darcy and I) followed so far – the ways that music affects us emotionally and how we respond to this – looking at creating something of a larger-scale composition of various musical (or non-musical) sounds seems very interesting. To “create infinite compositions through finite parts”, I think Sophie said.

I’m just gonna leave this here. 

How Does Your City Make You Feel? (2018) by Darcy Read, Denise Wang & Sam Harris

google drive link

My terrible planning and organisational skills kept me from getting to class on the Monday but I caught up on the week’s reading, Soar’s ‘Making (with) Korsakow’, outside of class and I pulled a quote to help guide myself through the reading.

“Korsakow films require attention and a reasonable investment in time without distractions.”

This is definitely something I noticed in my experience with projects created in the software. At every moment I’m aware of how much time I’m committing to certain things and I’m always asking myself internally whether it’s worth my time – this is part of the reason why I can’t hold myself to committing to something like The Witcher 3. I don’t have the damn time!! I can’t bring myself to invest in the fantasy of its world – there’s a thousand films I could be watching instead (I’ll never see them all, sure). There’s so much to consume, always on offer (especially given the proliferation of subscription-based services like Netflix and Spotify that posses boundless ends of “””””””content””””””). I find it hard to invest myself within the game’s world while the thousands of quests available in game float around me, uncompleted. This is why I’m always in a rush, always finding something to fill my time. In relation to Korsakow, I think it’s my unfamiliarity with the platform that gives it this uncertainty. If I commit a whole lot of my time to one project, eg. Ellis Island, do I trust it to reward me with something in the end – will I be full of insight, enlightened?; will I come out the other side dazed and confused?; somewhere in the middle?

In applying these ideas to our project, I can see how creating something that is initially simple in form could be attractive. Giving users a clear layout of the potential possibilities that are drawn within the project is good way of battling this rabbit-hole weary fatigue – though I don’t think there necessarily has to be this binary. Soar’s own Ceci N’est Pas Embres presents an enticing, multi-faceted Korsakow project (and of a scale that I would like to work towards in the future).

For our consultation in week 7, we presented a(n even more) more refined idea of our project. We looked back at the ways that modularity and variability could function within our project – how we can use these ideas within Korsakow to create a work that would function as an engaging piece of new media. We worked on constraints and settled on ‘line’ as a defining aesthetic descriptor and worked towards finding ways of capturing this within the city in a way that built a rhythm (that could then be complemented by the music).

(or: Learning What The Bloody Hell Korsakow Can Do)

Scale here is important: with Korsakow, we’re not setting out to create the most ambitious crossover event in the history of cinema; Korsakow is designed to give meaning/importance/significance to the small moments – the small stories, experiences, places – rather than large narratives. It’s for deconstructing the big into smaller fragments, isolating certain themes or ideas or moments, and from there, linking them together into non-linear sequences (ie. Hannah’s cool deconstruction of Sans Soleil – particularly inspiring work).

In the reading for week 6, Anna Weihl talks about Korsakow as a way of creating:

• small stories/worlds
• a networked world
• multilinearity
• uncertainty

Uncertainty here is key. Hannah used the internet as an example of a way to distinguish the non-linearity of a Korsakow project: when you click a link on the internet it can take you to one place; when you click a link on Korsakow, it can take you to many places. There’s a degree of uncertainty as to what comes next and that’s kinda the crux of the software. But, how can we do this in a way that promotes interactivity within the film and produces some kind of emotional connection?

At this point, somewhere between week 6 and 7, we’d refined our original ideas. The idea of creating an ‘aural Kuleshov effect’ – accurate definition notwithstanding – got under our skin and we wondered how we could use music, building off mine and Darcy’s previous project, to stir some kind of emotional effect in the viewer. In that project, we wondered how audio could be used as a prompt for viewers to create their own complementary video; in this project, we decided to invert it. The person receiving the work is now a viewer (though still an active viewer), no longer a consumer/prosumer/other media degree keyword. They don’t have to create something as a part of the work, they are now part of the work.